Making history | 15 June 2017

‘History is not the past,’ says the writer Hilary Mantel in the first of her Reith Lectures on Radio 4 (produced by Jim Frank, Tuesday). ‘It’s the method we’ve evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.’ In Resurrection: The Art and Craft, her series of five talks, Mantel shows her mettle as a novelist (most notably of the award-winning Wolf Hall and its sequel) and as a historian, too, arguing the case for historical fiction, once much-maligned as a literary genre precisely because it twists the facts to create a narrative, usually of a highly romanticised flavour. But facts are not truths, Mantel asserts provocatively. ‘The moment we are deceased we become the subject of stories. The process of fictionalisation is instant and natural and inevitable.’ Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, interpretation begins.

But to begin with she didn’t like making things up. She looked for evidence, spent ages reading up on the facts only to realise, as she was researching a book set in revolutionary France, that there are so many gaps in the record. It was these ‘erasures and silences’ that turned her into a novelist. How to fill them? She determined that although she ‘would make up a man’s inner torments’ she would never invent the colour of his drawing-room wallpaper. That detail she needed to know so that she could ‘look around the room through his eyes’. (A ‘snide’ critic complained of the book that followed that there was ‘a lot of wallpaper in it’.)